Wolf, Friedrich August

Friedrich August Wolf, (born Feb. 15, 1759, Haynrode, near Nordhausen, Brandenburg [now in Germany]—died Aug. 8, 1824, Marseille, France), German classical scholar who is considered the founder of modern philology but is best known for his Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), which created the “Homer question” in its modern form.

Extremely precocious, Wolf learned Greek, Latin, and French as a child. He was largely self-taught when in 1777 he became the first to be admitted to the University of Göttingen as a student of philology, then a minor branch of theology. From 1783 to 1806 he was professor at the University of Halle, where he raised philology to an independent branch of knowledge, and his intense lectures inspired a generation of students. Though the authorship of the Homeric poems had been questioned by some since antiquity, it was Wolf’s Prolegomena that jolted scholars out of their acceptance of the ancient blind bard as the sole author of the Iliad and Odyssey. Wolf’s theory that the poems were composed orally by more than one author and that their artistic unity was imposed on them at a later date opened the way to the modern understanding of epic tradition and the origins of poetry.